Infant gut microbiota development affects the host physiology throughout life, and organic acids are important key metabolites mediating microbiota-host relationships. This review summarizes our recent study on early-life gut microbiota development and its association with gut organic acid profiles. We further discuss key bacterial taxa, metabolic pathways, environmental factor, and bacterial cross-feeding that affect gut organic acid production in early life.

We often hear people say, “There are so many programs out there with the same purpose, I don’t know which one to use.” One possible reason is that there are various evaluation criteria. For example, even if the performance of a method is less than or equal to that of a conventional method, it is still considered valuable if it is much faster than the conventional one. There are many differential expression methods that are more powerful under certain conditions, such as a large (or small) number of replicates in the same group. In reality, however, there are some methods whose value is questionable. This is probably due to the fact that the comparison has been biased toward representative methods. In this paper, we explain why such methods can exist, using our experience in the field of RNA-seq differential expression analysis as an example. Supplementary materials are available online at: http://www.iu.a.u-tokyo.

ac.jp/kadota/r_seq2.html#about_book_JSLAB.

Due to the impact of COVID-19 disaster, our framework for bioinformatics education has been forced to undergo major changes since 2020. Online lectures have become the normal, and as a result, hands-on lectures that had been our main feature before the disaster disappeared. We also faced various difficulties mainly caused by the diverse PC environments. In 2021, the use of “Slack” enabled the sharing of "questions asked in the past and their consequences," which resulted in a certain amount of labor savings. We have also started lectures on the Python programming language in 2020 as well as updating our educational program. In this commentary, we review the efforts of our program and describe our vision for the future of bioinformatics education. Supplementary materials are available online at: http://www.iu.a.u-tokyo.ac.jp/kadota/r_seq2.html#about_book_JSLAB.